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 III

BEAUTIFUL JULIA AND MY LORD

T seemed somehow impossible, me going to be cook there all my days." So writes Sophy at a later date in regard to her life at Morpingham Hall. To many of us in our youth it has seemed impossible that we should pass all our days in the humdrum occupations and the mediocre positions in which we have in fact spent them. Young ambitions are chronicled only when they have been fulfilled—unless where a born autobiographer makes fame out of his failures. But Sophy had a double portion of original restlessness—this much the records of Morpingham years, scanty as they are, render plain. Circumstances made much play with her, but she was never merely the sport of chance or of circumstances. She was always waiting, even always expecting, ready to take her chance, with arm outstretched to seize Occasion by the forelock. She co-operated eagerly with Fate and made herself a partner with Opportunity, and she was quick to blame the other members of the firm for any lack of activity or forwardness. "You can't catch the train unless you're at the station—and take care your watch isn't slow," she writes somewhere in the diary. The moral of the reflection is as obvious as its form; it is obvious, too, that a traveller so scrupulous to be in time would suffer proportionate annoyance if the train were late. 19